Lancelot (16 page)

“No way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.

“Why not?”

“At least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”

“I see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.

An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don't you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis's father, that with Fluker along on a quail hunt you didn't need bird dogs, that Fluker
knew
where the birds were?

That was part of it sure enough—not that Elgin was like a bird dog but that in being smart and through some special dispensation, perhaps by reason of our very need and helplessness, we could depend on them for anything, not just to smell out quail, but to be M.I.T. smart, smarter than we, Jew-smart, no, smarter than Jews. I could hear my grandfather: I'll put that Elgin up against a Jew anytime, any Jew. Go pick your Jew.

“Does it have to be a film?” Elgin looked up at me; his tongue went sideways. I knew he had thought of something.

“What else—”

“How about a tape?”

“I want sight not sound.”

“Videotape.”

“How does that work?”

“Just like the closed-circuit TV camera you see in stores. Only—”

“Only?”

“Okay, look. How about this?” He swung round to the desk, picked up my pencil. His black eyes danced. It had come to him, the solution! “We use five mini-compact cameras here and here.” He put X's in the dumbwaiter outlets to Margot's and Raine's rooms.

“I thought of that. But what about the three across the hall?”

“We'll use the A/C vents.”

“The air conditioning?”

“Sure. We'll use mini-compacts with twenty-five millimeter lenses—small enough to see through a slot in the grill.”

“What about camera noise?”

“No noise. No film. It's a TV camera.”

“What about the dark?”

“We'll use a Vidicon pickup tube, a Philips two-stage light intensifier—you know, it works on the fiber-optics principle, can pick up a single quantum of light.”

“Then we'll need some light.”

“Moonlight will help.”

I looked at my feed-store calendar. “There's a half moon.”

He picked up his glasses. “I might use infrared.”

“Good.”

“All I need is a control room. That could be anywhere.”

“How about my father's library, here?”

“Don't Mr. Tex and Siobhan use that? We have to have a completely undisturbed place.”

“All I have to do is move the TV set. I'll put it in Siobhan's room here.”

“That's fine. I could bring in lead-in cables from the dumbwaiter and the A/C ducts by way of the third floor.”

“And what will you be doing in there?”

“Recording five tapes. I'll need a Conrac monitor.”

“How long will it take you to rig up all that?”

“Well, I'll have to go to New Orleans to get the equipment.” He looked at his watch. “Tomorrow. Then it would take the next day to rig it—if nobody was around.”

“They won't be. They're shooting in town the next two days. A courthouse scene and a love scene at the library.”

“Okay. I guess the best we can do is day-after-tomorrow night—and that's only if everything goes well and I can get the equipment. But I'm sure I can get it.”

“I hope so. Because they'll be shooting at Belle Isle in two or three days. Then it will be too late.”

“We can do it. All you got to do is clear the house tomorrow and the day after and clear the library at night.”

“How much will all that stuff cost?”

“The light intensifier is expensive, maybe four thousand. The whole works shouldn't run over eight or ten at the outside.”

“Ten thousand,” I said. “I have that in the house account. I think I'd better get cash for you. The bank opens at nine. You could be on your way by nine-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Then what will you end up with?”

“Five tapes. Something like this.” He picked up an eight-track cartridge of Beethoven's last quartets. During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

“There's only one problem,” said Elgin, turning the tape over and over.

“What's that?”

“Time. Not even this will record five hours.
Ah.
” He had it, the solution. For him now in a kind of exaltation of inventiveness, it was enough to put the problem into words. Saying it was solving it. He even snapped his fingers.

“We'll have to use the new Subiru motion activator.”

“What is that?” In the very offhandedness of his voice I could catch the excitement, the exhilaration of his knowledge and skill.

He shrugged. “You know, the voice-activated sound tape recorder? It only goes on when there is a noise.”

“Like the President had?”

“Yeah.” He was too happy to notice irony. “Same principle. Transferred to light. The tape only moves when something or someone in front of the camera moves.”

“Something or someone. You mean it wouldn't just record a sleeping person?”

“Only when he or she turned over. All he got to do is move—or talk.”

When something or someone moved. Yes, that was it. That was what I wanted. Who moved, toward whom, with whom.

It was necessary to visit the set, something I never did, in order to see how long the shooting would take and to warn Elgin should my houseguests decide to return to Belle Isle early. He must have time to arrange his own “set,” place and wire his cameras.

I needn't have worried. They spent all day on one short scene between Margot and Dana. Fifteen or twenty times he had her up against the library stacks performing “simulated intercourse.” He was filmed from the rear doing something to Margot quickly and easily. He was clothed.

Merlin was surprised to see me, but pleasant and talkative as usual. I told him I had come to make him welcome at Belle Isle and to be sure they had removed from the motel. Though the danger from the hurricane was slight, the motel was built in a swamp and could be flooded.

“You're a beautiful guy!” Merlin came close and took my arm. He had a way of making any encounter between us exclude the others. His blue eyes were fond; the white fiber made the iris spin with dizzy affection. “How extraordinary that a real hurricane should be approaching the same time as our make-believe hurricane. Actually though, this scene has nothing to do with the hurricane.”

“I want to hear the zipper,” Janos Jacoby told Dana.

The set was the small public library in town. Town folk watched, standing, arms folded, sitting on aluminum chairs, on the sidewalk, on the grass, in the doorway. Inside, the library was a mess; it looked as if the hurricane had already hit, everything moved out of the way to shoot Margot and Dana in the stacks. The blue-white lights were brighter and hotter than the sun outside. Heavy cables snaked over the trodden grass like a carnival ground. Between shots Dana zipped his pants, fell back, and cleaned his nails, listened inattentively to Jacoby. As the librarian in the movie, Margot wore glasses around her neck, white blouse, cashmere cardigan, sleeves pushed up. She was not at ease. Her face was cheeky and her movements wooden. She was. I saw instantly, not a good actress. What she was doing was not acting, that is, imitating someone else, but acting like an actress imitating-someone-else. She was once removed from acting.

Dana was something to see: barefoot, tight jeans with silver conch belt, some kind of pullover homespun shirt, necklace with single jade stone, perfect helmet of yellow hair, perfect regular features, perfect straight brows flaring like wings. He moved well and had grace. He was an idiot but he had grace. He was a blank space filled in by somebody else's idea. He was a good actor. His eyes had somehow been made up so they seemed to gather light and glow of themselves. The town folk gaped at him as if he were another species. Perhaps he was. Perhaps somewhere on the golden sands of California had come into being a new breed of perfect creatures, young and golden.

Margot couldn't see me. The lights were too bright.

“This is a very short scene but a very critical one,” Merlin explained. “It is the sexual liberation of Sarah.”

“Sexual liberation?”

“Yeah. You remember. Dana is the stranger who wanders into town from nowhere and is so extraordinarily gifted—everyone is immediately aware of it. Thank God for the movies. Dana gifted? He barely had sense not to drown when he fell off his surfboard in
Beach Blanket Bingo.
But look at him, isn't he something? We can create him from the beginning like a doll. I created Dana—Dana himself is nothing, a perfect cipher. This character, this stranger is immediately perceived by everybody as somehow different—for one thing his eyes, there's an inner light, he's a creature of light. Look at him. His normal temperature is around 101. He actually glows. Most important, he is free. Everybody else is hung up—as in fact everybody is, you're hung up, I'm hung up. Right? Sarah is a Joanne Woodward type—though Margot is actually a bit too young and good-looking—but she has never known what it is to be a woman. You know. Her husband, Lipscomb, is out of it too. He sits wringing his hands while the plantation goes to pot. She holds things together, makes a pittance at the library. He's hung up. Everyone is hung up. The sharecroppers, black and white, are hung up in poverty and ignorance. The townies are hung up in bigotry and so forth. Not only is the stranger free, he is also able to free others. There is the sense about him of having come from far away, perhaps the East, perhaps farther. Perhaps he is a god. At least he is a kind of Christ type.

“He fulfills people. He fulfills the longing of the sharecroppers for their own land—he discovers that Raine's, Ella's, family owns the land. He reconciles black and white—who discover their own common humanity during the hurricane. He even gets to the sheriff (God, I wish we could have got Pat Hingle), who despite himself is tremendously moved by this glowing nonviolent vibrant creature—actually there's a strong hint here of Southern sheriff homosexuality, right? He almost reaches Lipscomb, who has lost his ties with the land, nature, his own sexuality. He does reach Sarah. He walks into the library and while her mouth falls open, he simply goes to the bookshelf, takes down the
Rig-Veda,
and reads the great passage beginning: ‘Desire entered the One in the beginning.' Then, again without saying a word, he takes her hand and leads her back into the stacks, where he takes her standing against the old musty books—Thackeray and Dickens and so forth—representing the drying up of Western juices. There's a lovely tight shot of her face while she's making love against a dusty set of the Waverley novels. Great? The stranger is the life-giving principle, the books are dead, everyone is dead, Thackeray is dead. Scott is dead, the town is dead, Lipscomb is dead, she is dead, or rather she has never lived. So what we are trying to get across is that it is not just screwing, though there is nothing wrong with that either, but a kind of sacrament and celebration of life. He could be a high priest of Mithras. You see what we're getting at?”

Something went wrong. Jacoby called for an Arriflex hand-held camera and his assistant Lionel couldn't locate it. Jacoby came over to talk to Merlin. More or less automatically I held out my hand—not that I wanted to shake hands with him, but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there? Jacoby ignored me. His bemused eye looked through me and past me. I do believe that he did not insult me but rather did not see me. In his absorption I was part of the town decor, one of them. Merlin noticed the oversight and was embarrassed, cleared his throat, did not know what to do. There's the function of manners: that no one will not know what to do.

I rescued Merlin by asking him how long they were going to work today. “Oh, late! Late!” cried Merlin cordially. “And thanks so much for putting us up”—looking to Jacoby to echo thanks but Jacoby only nodded vaguely. I escaped and went out through the back, the office of the librarian.

Raine and Lucy and Miss Maude, the librarian, were there. Raine kissed me with every appearance of pleasure—what is she? actress? flirt? wanton? nice affectionate girl? Lucy followed suit somewhat absentmindedly. She was so frantic in her crush on Raine that she hardly noticed me.

“Isn't it exciting!” said Raine, putting her hands on my shoulders, rocking me a little, brushing knees. One knee came between my knees.

“What?”

“The hurricane!”

“I don't think it'll get here.”

“But the light! Haven't you noticed the peculiar yellow light and the sinister quietness about things? Isn't this usually true of hurricanes?”

“I suppose. I hadn't really noticed.”

“I was telling Lucy that there is more than coincidence involved here.”

“How's that?”

“How could such a coincidence happen, that at the very time we are making a film about a hurricane, a real hurricane should come?”

“Well, it could. This is hurricane season.”

“What are the mathematical chances involved? One in a million? There is more than weather involved. There is more than light involved. I feel the convergence of all our separate lines of force. Can't you feel something changed in the air between all of us?”